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by frgewut 2855 days ago
> Bike lanes (IMHO) have made traffic significantly worse because they're thoroughly underutilized and basically kill a lane of traffic (on the avenues at least).

Underutilized bike lanes is mostly an illusion. If a bicycle lane would be 100% utilized that would mean tens of thousands of people traveling each day. Probably equal to capacity of multiple car lanes.
1 comments
shard972 2855 days ago
Ok but if we determined the bike lanes were 0.00001% utilized while the car lanes are 80% utilized that doesn't make it an illusion.

Probably not that bad in NY but in the places i have lived i could go months without seeing someone on a particular bike lane that hugged the road for a few KMs

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KozmoNau7 2854 days ago
It is very likely because the connecting bike infrastructure is either not very good or completely lacking.

You can't make good bike infrastructure by simply painting a few bike lanes here and there that "hug the road for a few KMs". You need to look at a bigger picture and make bike-friendly connections between popular hotspots.

On top of this, there's apparently still a perception in the US that bikes are either for kids or purely for exercise, they're not really thought of as everyday transportation. Everyone with an interest in improving city traffic should come visit Amsterdam or Copenhagen. See how infrastructure with a primary focus on bicycles and public transit works, and which design decisions have helped shape city traffic.

An issue further compounding this is the insistence that bikes are completely the same as cars, and should follow the exact same rules. This leads to extremely dangerous lane changes and left turns, because cyclists are expected to use the car's left turn lanes. This danger can be easily mitigated by requiring cyclists to make hook turns[¤] instead. We do this in most European countries, and it's significantly safer for everyone involved.

[¤]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hook_turn

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TulliusCicero 2854 days ago
This is a real thing, absolutely, but mostly it's a problem because

a) the bike lanes/street design make it still dangerous to bike there ("door zone" bike lanes are particularly notorious for this), and

b) usually the overall bike lane network is heavily fragmented, with bike lanes suddenly ending and starting with no apparent rhyme or reason. "It's safe to bike for a good 50% of this trip" doesn't exactly fill people with confidence.

It is difficult to state just how bad bike infrastructure is in the US; really, it's quite bad in almost all countries.

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